Cirrus@Austlit

'The Near and the Far presents work in prose and poetry by twenty-one authors who participated in RMIT’s Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange project from 2014. Activities included residencies in Penang, Hoi An and the Yarra Valley where creative writing was produced in solitude in the morning and shared with the group in the afternoon. Apart from the power and beauty of the individual works, the collection has the larger interest of the process, showing what can happen when creativity is prompted, provoked and nurtured in circumstances that are designed in a considered way but also expect the unexpected. This is new work ‘from the Asia-Pacific Region’, a peculiar but seemingly unavoidable bit of nomenclature, used more in Australia than elsewhere, to indicate a geo-political inclusiveness of which Australia desires to be part and a pragmatic flexibility about whether the designation refers to the writer or the story. Many of the authors and their stories are in fact mobile across this notional space, open to new possibilities, as Alice Pung notes in her foreword.' (Introduction)